This Isn’t Your Father’s Weed — and It’s Tied to 40 Percent of Fatal Crashes

It’s been six years since legal weed went on sale in Ohio — and now it seems nearly half the stoners in fatal crashes forgot to just stay home and eat their Cheetos. A new Wright State University study showed that more than four out of 10 deadly car crashes included a driver with high levels of THC in their bloodstream.

The study, just published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, reviewed data for 246 deceased Ohio drivers, and found an average THC blood level of 30.7 ng/ML — 15 times the state's legal limit — in 41.9% of dead drivers. Ohio is a fairly typical state in most regards, so I'd take that 42% as a good-enough approximation of trends in states with legal weed.

Almost a dozen years have passed since legal weed first went on sale in Colorado and Oregon, so the numbers, high as they are (heh), don't surprise me. But the report is also frustrating in the context that it lacks. What percentage of fatal crashes involved weed before 24 states legalized recreational sales?

The closest we get to that side of the issue is this item from the ACS writeup: "The rate of drivers who tested positive for THC did not change significantly before or after legalization (42.1% vs. 45.2%), indicating that legal status did not influence the behavior of those who chose to drive after use."

The study only reaches back six years — by which time medical marijuana, often a fig leaf for recreational use, had already been legal for four years. Prior to medical (and then recreational marijuana) becoming more widely available, there wasn't nearly as much testing — making the data frustratingly incomplete.

The best I could come up with was setting Grok loose on the problem. Even Grok sounded a bit frustrated with the lack of data, but what it could find for THC-impaired dead drivers varied wildly from 1.1% in a single 1994 study, all the way up to 9% in 2000.

But both are a far cry from the 42% found much more recently in Ohio.

Is availability to blame? Potency? Both?

It's been said many times before, but this is not your father's weed.

For personal reasons I won't bore you with, 36 years ago, 19-year-old me moved to Eureka, Calif. — deep in Humboldt County. Or as we used to call it, "Behind the Redwood Curtain." My running joke was that there were three kinds of people in Humboldt: the hippies, the loggers, and me (and my weird friends).

Humboldt was famous among pot connoisseurs for the notoriously strong Humboldt Homegrown, mostly out of farms around Garberville. Hikers and campers were advised on how to safely back away if they happened to stumble upon a pot-growing field nestled in the redwoods.

Testing wasn't as frequent back then, but even the prized Homegrown rarely ran above a concentration of 15% THC. The stuff Humboldt State University hippie-wannabes could usually find was probably around 10-12%, and they bragged about it to their friends back home.

And Another Thing: HSU (now Cal Poly Humboldt) back then had a surprising number of kids from nice families in Los Angeles. Their parents sent them north to get them away from the L.A. drug scene. Out of the cocaine frying pan, into the weed and shrooms fire. SMH.

The point of sharing my somewhat ridiculous backstory is that the super-powerful weed that you had to go to Humboldt — or a bit later, to British Columbia — to buy just semi-reliably on the black market would barely pass muster with ordinary, everyday pot smokers shopping at a legal dispensary today.

Here in Colorado, the average THC concentration of the legal stuff is approximately 21%, based on comprehensive lab testing of weed statewide. That's just the average concentration.

Frogurt — a name-brand grown and sold in Michigan — tests at 41%. Something called Future #1 is up to 37% THC, and the Permanent Marker brand runs at an average of 34%.

Back in the day, the hard-to-find 15% stuff was the much-sought-after "one-hit weed." The average pot today is 50% stronger. But for people willing to pay a little more, they can get stuff four times more powerful than much of anything your typical 1990 dorm-room smoker enjoyed behind the Redwood Curtain.

The industrial-scale pot-growing enabled by legalization made the stronger concentrations possible, probably even inevitable. Easy availability changes the equation, too. Around 2000, 5% or so of adults reported "regular" pot use of at least once a month. In 2024, that number was 15%.

But cultural conditions have changed greatly since 2000. People were likely less willing back then to answer positively. So we just don't know what the true figures are, but if the trendline is up for regular pot smoking, then the trendline for potency is way up.

About the only thing we can conclude with any certainty is that you'd have to be stoned out of your gourd to think it's a good idea to drive while impaired.

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